Today I learned… in code

A lot happens between "Hello World" and "Supreme Master Programmer". Here, we share little discoveries made along the way. The more frustrating something was, the more likely it is to end up here on this site!

That referrer, cdn1-mycompany.netdna-ssl.com, isn’t allowed to serve this file. But there’s an easy fix: you can whitelist the CDN itself in the CDN.

The fix: whitelist the CDN itself

In MaxCDN, go to Pull Zones > Security > Whitelist.

You might already have yourdomain.com in here. What you need to add is the domain your CDN files are pulled from.

In my case, that was a domain that took the form of cdn1-mydomain.netdna-ssl.com, but you can find out what yours is by looking in the Network tab while you try to load your site. Look for a red-colored error message and open the Headers.

Anyway, the fix is as easy as adding the domain to this list of whitelisted domains and waiting a few minutes (for me it was about 10 minutes). Reload your website and the Font Awesome icons should now appear.

Note: You will probably need to Purge All Caches, too, once the time has passed to actually see the change in your browser (I use the dropdown in the WP toolbar).

My W3 Total Cache settings

(Just in case it’s useful to someone else trying to debug this problem)

My W3 Total Cache settings are set to upload .css, .tff, .otf, .woff, and .woff2 files.

Provided again as text so you can copy/paste.

wp-includes file types to upload:

*.css;*.js;*.gif;*.png;*.jpg;*.xml

Theme file types to upload:

*.css;*.js;*.gif;*.png;*.jpg;*.ico;*.tff;*.otf;*.woff;*.woff2

This is a pretty specific configuration issue but hopefully it’ll help someone else out there!